Learning about the universe and probing it through research helps reveal fundamental wonders of the natural world, and I feel closer to its sacredness through this process.
When I moved to India, however, I began to encounter aspects of religion and spirituality that I could not quite wrap my head around. References to astrology, a field in which people try to make predictions about the future based on the positions of stars and planets in the sky, are present to some degree in almost every traditional Hindu household. People often use astrology to guide major life decisions, such as whether they should marry a particular person. The logic of astrology makes little sense to me because I have not found evidence that planetary movements actually influence or predict the events of daily human life. However, as scientists like to say, "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." Indians, including my own grandmother, have been using astrology for thousands of years and some swear by the accuracy of its predictions. Who am I to tell them that they are wrong, given that I only have twenty-one years of experience on Earth? I tried to keep an open mind.
This became more difficult when my friend in India told me that after he finishes his PhD, he plans to move to the Himalayas, a mountain range cited in Hindu mythology as possessing spiritual energy, to meditate for at least ten years so that he can "liberate himself from his body." I did not quite understand what this meant.
